The Catalan coach chose to play without a striker two seasons ago, but now uses an old-fashioned system at the Etihad Stadium.
Last year, a panel of prominent former BT Sport players paid tribute to Pep Guardiola for transforming English football. Rio Ferdinand, Joe Cole and Glen Hoddle praised the Manchester City manager for getting the nation to embrace European ideas, saying that since the serial-winning Catalan arrived in England in 2016 he had helped change the culture for the better.
“Now we have adopted that European way of playing and our ideas about football,” Ferdinand said. “Being in and around the academies, the training is very different to when we were growing up, when it was all shouting and dragging people left and right. Whereas now it’s very much Guardiola’s culture, which he has a big influence on had.” that style of football.” Hoddle added: “We were stuck in our 4-4-2 way of playing in the 1970s and 1980s.”
Guardiola has played down this idea whenever it has arisen, stating that it has not changed English football and he never wanted it to. “I haven’t changed anything at all. Every coach has his own ideas, to be honest I haven’t changed anything,” he said last May.
But he has admitted that English football has changed him and that he has taken “a lot of things” with him from his adopted home. “Of course this has changed me. I have met new players, new styles, new coaches, new ways of dealing with the media, with my players. Every coach is a better coach than he was at the beginning.”
Last season, Guardiola adopted an old idea from Tony Pulis, who would normally be seen as his philosophical opposite, by playing with four centre-backs in some matches and converting Nathan Ake and Manuel Akanji into full-backs. And this season he has adopted another old idea: playing in the 4-4-2 formation that Hoddle spoke of as a sign of how old-fashioned English football had become.
However, every innovation from Guardiola requires a lot of thought and planning, and the idea behind his latest tactical plan is quite simple: it’s a way to accommodate his two world-class attackers. Erling Haaland and Julián Álvarez.
Source: Goal